The Elite Debate

David Brooks responds to Chris Hayes in today’s New York Times. In The Twilight of the Elites, Hayes argues the dramatic “fails” of the past decade are attributable to an Iron Law of Meritocracy, which asserts “that eventually the inequality produced by a meritocratic system will grow large enough to subvert the mechanisms of mobility.” According to Hayes, this creates a self-enclosed elite incapable of policing itself or pursuing the common good. Brooks counters:

The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.

I’m working on a review of the book for the print magazine, so readers interested in more extended reflections will have to wait. But I want to consider briefly where Hayes’ and Brooks’ disagreement actually lies.

As I understand it, Hayes’ view is not simply that inequality encourages corruption. It’s that meritocracy is especially vulnerable to corruption because it claims that the rich and powerful personally deserve their success. Rather than members of a responsible ruling class, in other words, our meritocrats tend to regard themselves as exceptional individuals who owe nothing more to society than bare compliance with the law. And that’s just what Brooks means by the observation that “today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.”

Brooks and Hayes basically agree, then, in their diagnosis. They disagree concerning the prescription. Hayes endorses redistributive taxation and affirmative action to reduce the material and physical distance between the few and the many. Brooks believes that if today’s hedge fund managers and TV hosts only recognized their privilege, they could be brought to revive “the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess.” For Hayes, in other words, the problem is the distribution of goods. For Brooks, it’s a psychological issue.

Brooks’ position seems like wishful thinking. The WASP elite relied on intermarriage, brutal social pressure, and pervasive discrimination to enforce its norms, often at considerable cost to personal fulfillment. At least after World War II, moreover, taxes were also extremely high. Brooks wants to reconstitute esprit d’corps and public spirit of the old Establishment by appealing to the consciences of individuals with little more in common than high test scores. As the kids say, good luck with that.

Why does Brooks miss the tension between meritocracy and noblesse oblige? I suspect it’s because he makes the mistake, characteristic of mainstream conservatives, of supposing that “values” determine the social practice. If we just had better values, this argument goes, society would function differently. Moral education thus becomes the crucial vector of reform.

This position is at odds with the Weberian tradition on which Hayes draws (and which is indebted to classical conservatism). On that view, values tend to reflect the structure of society. From the Weberian perspective, people’s behavior doesn’t change in a fundamental way because they are taught to be nice. It changes because the institutional and material conditions under which they live have been significantly altered.

Brooks opposes this kind of change because he thinks it’s too risky. Hayes embraces it because he thinks that it will reduce opportunities for corruption.

I think Brooks is probably too cautious, and Hayes too optimistic. We’re in not danger of a society without bosses, as Brooks fears. But there’s little reason to think that new bosses favored by Hayes–financial regulators and diversity officers, among others–would be so much more responsible than the old ones.

There is a related issue: a growing proportion of the elite belong to minorities with little relation to or sympathy with the majority. I don’t refer money or education alone; I mean race, culture and religion.

Imperial systems have a tendency to promote “new men”, not because they are better or smarter, but because the Emperors know that their loyalty can be bought more easily had than those whose roots go deeper and whose identification with the nation and its historical character is stronger.

Seems to me the assumption both Goldman and McConnell miss about this issue is the incredibly dubious if not downright laughable one that our elites today indeed became such due to merit.

After all what’s been the performance of our international affairs elites of late? Lots of unwinnable, bankrupting stupid wars with no end in sight all over the globe.

And what about our financial elites? Oh yeah, that’s right, if it weren’t for the bailouts all those geniuses would be selling apples on the street corner.

And what about our political elites? Ummm, does the fact that very soon are going to be paying 50% + of all our tax revenues just for debt interest service shed any light on their merit? Their approval of all those wars and crap the foreign policy elites have touted? How wonderfully they managed and oversaw Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae? What a great job they’ve done with our immigration system and situation?

And need I mention the accomplishments of our elite media folks? Where there’s effectively not even *one* major outlet today that isn’t damn near openly corrupted by partisanship, or in thrall to the Establishment?

And what about the indubitable fact that when it comes to so many of those individuals of undoubted merit and accomplishment, they will openly note the horror with which they view the idea of them getting involved in or political system given the hackery and corruption involved in same? And what indeed about the clear hack level of so many of our political elites? If they truly spring from so much merit, how come so many come to office from the private sector with bank balances and net worths at typical middle-class levels, and yet after only a few years in office those financial statements are soaring?

Or are we talking “merit” in terms of ability to milk the system?

And then we come to our academic elites, turning the very institutions that are supposed to be the most fiercely devoted to open debate and free speech into the most intellectually cowed institutions we have via Political Correctness.

“Merit” isn’t the adjective that comes to my mind when talking about our modern elites then. “Incestuousness” sure does, as does “hackery,” but “merit”? No.

And *particularly* the former when it comes to Mr. Brooks and his NY Times perch.

Assessing the corruptibility of the Power Elites is the wrong tack, a red herring. The real civic pathology is ascribing unique intelligence, wisdom and insight to Power Elites that they just don’t have. I.e., they may be smart, but they ain’t that smart.

The issue is that the power afforded Elites is hyper-scaled to the (mediocre) insight they evidence while wielding it.

E.g., Hillary Clinton (Yale) flits from country to country in what amounts to a make-work job of profound impotence. St. David Petraeus (Princeton) left Iraq and Afghanistan pathological messes which resulted in his promotion to Commanding General of CIA Forces. Ben Bernanke (Harvard) has astutely managed the destruction of the American monetary system. As for Barack Obama (Harvard), it goes with out saying.

And let’s not forget to include the element of ideological symmetry that encapsulates the Power Elites. E.g., George Bush (Yale, Harvard), legacy wreckage firmly in place and Mitt Romney (Harvard), Power Elite fiascoes yet to be written.

Totally agree with TomB and SteveM. I think that Hayes gets into this a bit, but the idea that the elite got to where they are through talent and hard work overstates the case by many miles. Our elite maintain a web of connections to maintain themselves, just like every other elite that’s ever been. There are many, many talented, hard-working individuals who don’t have a chance in hell of becoming part of the elite because they just don’t have the connections and opportunities. Not to mention the biggest reason why the elite are a problem: they can’t fail. No matter how dumb, worthless and destructive they are, in a society where money and power rule the world, they can always buy and influence their way out of trouble. That, I think, is the real root of the issue if we want to get down to causes and solutions – our love of money and power above all else. Perhaps our younger generations, faced with the impossibility of grabbing their share of the money and power by the bad fruit of the last couple of generations can actually embrace other values en masse. But short of that, I don’t think there’s anything else to do but shake things up as much as possible every so often.

I would just hasten to add that nothing in my general contention that our present elites did not gain their positions via merit and instead via something else does no violence to Brook’s thesis that they lack a public spiritedness. Not only self-evidently, but indeed spectacularly, they do.

Indeed it seems to me my contention fills the giant hole left by Brooks’ failure to identify *why* they do so: If, after all, you owe your position *not* to society’s demanding merit but instead to some other force, well why the hell *should* you feel any public spiritedness for the society? *It* didn’t get you your position. Something and/or someone else did.

Instead Brooks just argues … something out of nothing: Gee, the elites of today just lost the public spiritedness of those of yesterday for no good reason.

And Brooks’ contention that our elites don’t see themselves as elites is the most transparent hogwash imaginable. Everyone even outside the fields knows the status yardstick. And if the majority of current elites didn’t see their positions as being elite that majority wouldn’t even be occupying them because they would never have fought the fights necessary to get them.

What Brooks is really doing here then is recognizing the validity of my argument that no-body believes in the meritocracy of our elites anymore, and that this endangering it which he very much dislikes.

But of course occupying an uber-elite position himself he wants to believe he got it via merit. And then there’s that uncomfortable little fact that prior to being elevated to a regular column by the glittering New York Times there he was, just a mere respectable but certainly not particularly followed or popular conservative talker, who just happened to be jewish and wear his affection for Israel on his sleeve just like … the Times general foreign affairs correspondent, and just like the Times present chief Israeli correspondent, and just like the Times former chief Israeli correspondent, and just like ….

So Brooks likes the present elites system just fine; indeed he’s so worried about it that’s why he’s writing. He just wants to save the “system” that got them there and so in effect pleading with its products to be at least a little less obviously and grotesquely self-interested.

Like I say though why the hell should they? Not only didn’t they get to where they are via merit, but even worse oftentimes they got there with the understanding that they *continued* to owe whatever or whoever did get them there. And, by its very definition, that special interest obligation runs *precisely* contrary to the general public interest.

Regbecca Trotter wrote “[…] the biggest reason why the elite are a problem: they can’t fail. No matter how dumb, worthless and destructive they are, in a society where money and power rule the world, they can always buy and influence their way out of trouble.”

Corporate frauds skulking off with golden parachutes, pundits who were wrong about everything that matters – and who often as not don’t speak or write well – still ensconced as news analysts or op/ed columnists, athletes and other celebrities in rehab for the nth time, priest-molesters bundled off into some church funded “retreat”, all pirouetting from one failure, botch or malfeasance to the next with nary a consequence